


if at first you don't succeed (cry, and try again)

by roundabout



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Coming to terms with prosthesis, Healing via baked goods, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Post-Canon Fix-It, Recipe included, Therapy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-04
Updated: 2021-02-04
Packaged: 2021-03-16 07:13:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,694
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29203401
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/roundabout/pseuds/roundabout
Summary: When Keith was still an angry kid with bruised knuckles and scabbed-over knees, his sixth grade teacher spent a whole month teaching a unit on the fourth world war.“During interviews conducted after the armistice,” she had told the class on the very last day, “most soldiers agreed that the hardest part wasn’t fighting in the war itself, but the days after they came home, after they returned to their families. When the world was supposed to just return to normal, and they realized that they had been irrevocably changed.”Keith had scoffed, disbelieving, and dismissed it at the time—how could coming home ever be as painful as waging war?
Relationships: Keith/Shiro (Voltron)
Comments: 6
Kudos: 49
Collections: Sheith Cookbook





	if at first you don't succeed (cry, and try again)

my hands are always holding tight to the rip cord of believing  
a life can be rich like the soil,  
can make food of decay,  
turn wound into highway.  
~ Andrea Gibson, _The Madness Vase_

— ∞ —

When the war stutters to an abrupt halt, the people of Earth do what they have always done: they pick up, and they move on.

Keith sits on Black’s broad shoulder, sweat sticking his hair to his nape, baking under the noonday sun. Black perches on the edge of a harsh, rocky ridge that looms over the deep valley of an old quarry. The shadow she casts is short, but shields the workers below from the worst of the desert sun as they carve into rock.

The ground rumbles and the wind picks up, sending dust and grit whipping through the air as Yellow tucks close to Black’s side. Keith can feel the satisfied shift in the back of his mind as Black reaches out to welcome her. Yellow’s head tips back in answer, her big, square maw opening wide, and Hunk clambers out, all sunkissed skin and massive smile.

“We’re close,” he calls, swiping red dirt from his temple with the back of his hand. He gestures down to Blue’s slender figure where it sits amidst the hustle and bustle below. Allura’s voice echoes faintly through a loudspeaker as she directs the machinery and manpower. “Few more days, and we’ll have a whole community carved out of rock. This is gonna be so _cool!_ ”

Hunk’s excitement is contagious, and Keith finds himself mirroring the energy, scarred cheek puckering as he smiles.

Feet dangling from Yellow’s jaw over the deathly drop, Hunk continues, “So make sure you and Shiro make it to our celebratory dinner when it’s all said and done, all right?”

Keith’s easy grin goes a little stiff around the edges, but then he thinks of Shiro’s wide, toothy smile and the loose set of his shoulders on the last night they had all gathered around one table. Keith’s pause stretches out a little too long as he turns it over in his mind, dead air turning sour, but then he nods.

“Yeah,” he says, “we’ll be there.”

— ∞ —

When Keith was still an angry kid with bruised knuckles and scabbed-over knees, his sixth grade teacher spent a whole month teaching a unit on the fourth world war.

“During interviews conducted after the armistice,” she had told the class on the very last day, “most soldiers agreed that the hardest part wasn’t fighting in the war itself, but the days after they came home, after they returned to their families. When the world was supposed to just return to normal, and they realized that they had been irrevocably changed.”

Keith had scoffed, disbelieving, and dismissed it at the time—how could coming home ever be as painful as waging war?

— ∞ —

It’s the sharp sound of shattering glass echoing in the small confines of their Garrison-issued apartment that snaps Keith out of the dull monotony of unwanted paperwork.

He freezes, statue still in his desk chair with his heart in his throat and one hand on the hilt of his knife, until he hears a heavy sigh and a muffled curse filter through the office door.

The first thing Keith notices when he slips into the kitchen isn’t Shiro’s tense, miserable shoulders, or the defeated slump of his spine—though they are a close second and third. It’s the massive prosthetic, propped up on its knuckles and abandoned in the corner like a scolded dog.

Shiro works one-handed, very carefully corralling the splintered remnants of a water glass into a jagged pile before transferring each piece into a bag in the sink. His jaw is set, the muscles there tight and jumping as he works, but when the floorboard under Keith’s left foot creaks, a fixed smile finds its way to his mouth.

“Keith,” he breathes, voice on the wrong side of raw. “I—”

The words stopper up, thick on his tongue, and Keith steps forward to drop a kiss to his flesh-and-metal shoulder. “It’s okay,” he says. “Want a hand?”

There’s a brief, incredulous pause, then a sharp bark of laughter, ugly with the release of an invisible tension. Shiro passes his wrist across his eyes.

“No,” he chokes. Then, gasping, “Yeah. Yes, _Keith_ —”

— ∞ —

The therapist Keith sees on Wednesdays, and again with Shiro every Friday morning, tells him at the tail end of a solo session that, sometimes, people don’t want a saviour. Sometimes, she says, what they need isn’t a white knight or a Hail Mary, it’s the ability and the space to overcome a problem on their own. _Alone,_ she says, smiling, _but supported._

Keith thinks of that, turning her words over and over in his mind like smooth stones, until dawn creeps over the horizon.

— ∞ —

“I was thinking,” Keith mumbles into his morning coffee, studying the dark circles that have made their homes under Shiro’s eyes. “Let's make something for the dinner instead of picking something up like last time.”

Bleary despite the early sun streaking in through their dusty window, Shiro blinks. “Us?” he asks, tone incredulous. “Make food for the others?”

Keith shrugs, a simple raise and drop of one shoulder. His mug clunks down against their tabletop. “Why not? Nothing big. Would just be nice to bring something we made with our own hands.”

The metal arm at Shiro’s side rotates: left, right, then makes a full rotation. It’s a nervous gesture Keith doesn’t see very often.

“Sure,” Shiro says after a beat, scratching the fine stubble on his jaw with his flesh-and-bone fingers. Eyes a million miles away, he slumps back in his chair with a long sigh. His arm rotates. His tone dries up and cracks like sunbaked earth. “What’s the worst that can happen?”

— ∞ —

It takes less effort than Keith expects to gather the ingredients—there aren’t many to start with, and they already have the butter and their joint rations of sugar. The flour and vanilla would have cost an arm and a leg at a swap meet, but when Shiro catches Hunk by his elbow in the officers’ mess, Hunk’s smile blooms like a desert rose.

A small bundle—filled to brimming with fine milled flour and small brown vials of homebrewed vanilla extract—finds its way onto their doorstep before the sun dips low enough to kiss the broken horizon.

— ∞ —

Friday morning sprawls out into infinity. The world narrows down to a comfortable room, and the clasp of their hands, and the kind face of their therapist. Time becomes meaningless. Friday evening is lost to their dim bedroom, and the special sort of lethargy that comes with emotional exhaustion.

Saturday morning, the call comes in that construction has wrapped on the cliff-face homes—cool and comfortable and beautiful in ways Keith can’t put into words. A hundred free homes for a hundred homeless families. Saturday night, the Paladins will gather.

Two aprons hang from the cabinet door beside the kitchen sink, waiting.

— ∞ —

“Are you sure this is a good idea?”

Shiro’s right hand twists left, then right, then makes a full rotation. His body is tight, thrumming with potential energy. Nerves roll off of him in waves, and Keith catches his palm on the way back from the windowsill where their butter had been warming in the sun. The metal is pleasantly cool under his lips when he drops a sweet kiss to its center.

“Dad used to make this with me as a kid,” Keith tells him as he sets the butter on the counter and digs an old metal bowl out from under the sink. “It’s impossible to mess up. Trust me, I’ve tried.”

Keith shoves a set of measuring cups into Shiro’s chest, then sets about attacking the butter with a fork. Shiro huffs a laugh, measures out the sugar awkwardly with his left hand, and dumps more into the bowl than Keith thinks is strictly necessary.

“You say that now. Just wait until I’ve crumpled the bowl and the dough with it,” Shiro says, but there is something dark lingering under his light tone. Keith stirs, and stirs, and thinks. Smooth stones, rolling.

The bowl gets passed off to Shiro’s detached hand as it sneaks its way towards the corner. Keith spins under the guise of measuring out vanilla—then doubling it, because if there is one thing his father always said, it’s that you can never add too much vanilla—leaving Shiro to take over the mixing while Keith rummages through Hunk’s care package.

“Yeah, I do,” Keith finally replies, taking his time measuring the flour before dumping a small amount in at a time. Shiro mutters under his breath as the creamed butter and sugar thickens into dough. His brows furrow in concentration, then in frustration, then the fork he had taken over brandishing is tossed into the sink. He’s so focused on mixing in the fits and starts of flour that he doesn’t think twice about going in with both hands.

Keith rubs his smile on the back of his wrist to hide it. “Dad always said that if we mixed it too much, we can always pretend it’s Scottish shortbread instead. And the worst we can do is start over.”

They end up making three batches, stretching their paltry supplies to the limit.

The first never quite makes it to the oven—“just a taste” turns into two, turns into six, turns into an empty bowl and bloated groaning on the cool linoleum tile. The second is what Keith’s dad had jokingly called Scottish—crisp, dense, and delicious, but firm and over-mixed. Not quite right.

The third batch turns out perfectly.

— ∞ —

They meet the others on the edge of the Garrison grounds, carrying a plate of cookies each, smelling of warm sugar and vanilla. There is a smudge of flour lingering against the sharp cut of Shiro’s jaw, just below the curve of his bright smile. Keith can’t keep himself from reaching out to thumb it off when Shiro’s head tips back from the force of his laughter.

The metal bowl sits soaking in their kitchen sink, undented.

**Author's Note:**

> If you wanna make the emotional catharsis cookies too:
> 
> Ingredients:  
> 1 cup of salted butter, softened  
> ⅔ cup sugar  
> 2 teaspoons vanilla extract  
> 2 cups flour, sifted
> 
> Place warm, softened (but not melted!) butter and sugar in a bowl. Cream them together until the mixture is light and fluffy, then stir in vanilla. 
> 
> Sift flour into the bowl, and combine. Mix gently with a spoon and/or clean hands until the dough comes together and feels soft and slightly crumbly. The less the dough is worked, the softer the final cookies will be. 
> 
> Roll dough into a log using seran wrap and refrigerate for 30 minutes to an hour. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Prepare a baking sheet with parchment paper and/or a silicone baking mat.
> 
> Remove wrapping and cut off even slices with a knife. Place the slices evenly spaced on the baking sheet. Bake for approximately 10 minutes, or until the edges of the cookies turn a light, golden brown. 
> 
> \---
> 
> You can find me on twitter @ [aroundab00t](https://twitter.com/aroundab00t)


End file.
